Student Project Helps Soldiers Detect Bombs

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Soldiers suspicious that a truck or box may contain explosives or chemical weapons may soon be able to find out for sure by shooting the target with a sticky little projectile that can detect the danger and report it from afar.

The crayon-sized sensor, fired from a standard paintball gun, was invented by a team of University of Florida undergraduate engineering students as part of a government- and corporate-supported engineering research and education program at UF. Lockheed Martin's Orlando-based Missiles and Fire Control, which sponsored the project, plans to refine the projectile and put it into production, and there is a chance it could be used in Iraq, Lockheed officials say.

"That (use in Iraq) was the original genesis," said Leslie Kramer, director and engineering fellow for Missiles and Fire Control, explaining the sensor would be an ideal tool for identifying improvised explosive devices, or IEDs - disguised homemade bombs that have injured and killed scores in Iraq.

"A lot of these things are being buried in piles of trash," he said. "If you had a good chemical sensor on this projectile, you could fire it into the trash and stand back and determine whether it could detect TNT leaking out of an artillery shell."

Guided by mechanical and aerospace engineering Professor Loc Vu-Quoc, a team of six engineering seniors designed and built the projectile over the course of the year-long Integrated Product and Process Design, or IPPD, program.

The team built a tiny circuit board containing a transmitter, sensor and wire antenna, all powered by a watch battery. They inserted the circuit board in a cylindrical case tipped with a sticky industrial polymer.

"We made its tip heavy so it's like a dart, it doesn't tumble over," said electrical engineering student Felipe Sutantri.

Chemical and explosive detectors are expensive and difficult to work with, so the team tested their prototype using a tiny accelerometer, a sensor that registers movement. In a variety of tests, the team showed that accelerometers and other electronics could survive being shot out of the gun and striking a target. They were able to measure the accelerometer's data remotely at impact using oscilloscopes and laptop computers, much the way laptop-equipped soldiers might glean information from a deployed version of the projectile on the battlefield.

"I think the most important thing for the proof of concept was to see if the electronics could survive the impact," Sutantri said.

The students' tests proved the transmitter could report data up to 240 feet from the laptop, while the paintball gun could shoot the projectile at least 65 feet. Both distances could be extended in the production version, and engineers also likely will shrink the projectile's size and weight.

Tara Plew, a research engineer at Missiles and Fire Control and the employee who worked most closely with the students, said the projectile "has created all kinds of excitement in the company," with two U.S. military bases asking for written descriptions of the device.

Loc Vu-Quoc, vu-quoc@ufl.edu

by Aaron Hoover